Statistics counters may be used anywhere it may be necessary or advantageous to measure or record a count or rate. In network processing, for example, statistics counters are used to track traffic flows. Traffic flows may be measured any number of ways, e.g., by a frame count or rate, a corresponding octet count or rate, or some other measure. Network traffic flows for 10 gigabit Ethernet can be as high as 15 million frames per second and 1250 million bytes per second. If statistics counters of the same size were used to record, e.g., a frame count and a byte count, the two counters would overflow at different rates. Prior to overflow, a statistics counter must be “polled” (i.e., the count read). Therefore, if two or more counters overflow at different rates, the counter(s) that overflow more quickly would have to be polled more often, requiring unequal polling resources by the network processor and, for the counters requiring faster polling, much more processing resource. It would be better to configure a statistics counter so that polling would be more equal and therefore processing resources more equal.